The first thing that I did after I got a Twitter account was look for a desktop client for Linux. Unfortunately, I only found a few, and most them are still under development and their features are anemic.

I have tried several good Twitter clients, but it was on my OS X desktop. The one that I really like most is twhirl. I later found out that twhirl is also available for Linux, but I will need to install Adobe AIR (Adobe Integrated Runtime) first for it to work. At that time, Adobe AIR for Linux is still in Alpha stage. However, it didn't stop me from installing AIR and twhirl on Linux. Though I successfully installed them on my Xubuntu Macbook Pro laptop, twhirl looked terrible and crashed often. I gave up and just wished Pidgin will someday integrate a twitter client.

Then came the good news; Adobe recently released the Beta version of AIR for Linux, so I gave twhirl another try.

Adobe AIR Beta + twhirl = Awesome!Not only did I get the many features of twhirl (e.g. can change color schemes, search tweets, tweet notifications, ability to shorten URLs) I also enjoyed its stability and efficiency. No more crashes this time. I found out that twhirl is not resource hungry at all contrary to what others have said. I also noticed that it has lesser CPU and memory usage when running in Linux than in OS X.

Installing Adobe AIR Beta and twhirl in Linux is as easy as ABC. Here's how:

3. Using the terminal, install Adobe AIR by first granting it the execution rights:

$ chmod +x adobeair_linux_b1_091508.bin

Then install it with:

$ ./adobeair_linux_b1_091508.bin

Here's how my terminal looks:

A graphical installer will then appear after the install command:

4. After you have successfully installed AIR, simply right-click on the downloaded twhirl package to install it, and then open it with Adobe AIR. A graphical installer will then show up:

5. Just click 'install' and then wait for a few seconds, and you are done. Have a look at my shiny Twitter desktop client:

Final Notes:

It's good to know that Adobe AIR is now getting better and better in Linux as there are plenty of great applications that rely on AIR. To wrap this up: Is twhirl currently the most awesomest Twitter desktop client for Linux?--Absolutely!